President Obama and the Congress should rename military bases that honor rebels and terrorists.

The brutal racist murders in Charleston, S.C., have sparked a national self-examination about how we continue to use symbols of the Confederacy. South Carolina and Mississippi are reconsidering the prominence they give to the Confederate battle flag. Various states are moving to stop allowing the rebel flag to go on license plates, and others are re-evaluating the placement of statues of Confederate leaders. These are actions being taken by the states. But Congress and the president have work to do as well.

There are 10 U.S. Army bases named after Confederate officers. On the face of it, this notion seems absurd: How could the U.S. Army maintain bases named after generals who led soldiers who fought and killed U.S. Army soldiers; indeed, who might have killed such soldiers themselves? Built in the first half of the 20th century during the buildups of the world wars, these and other hastily built camps now closed were named after local military figures. Feelings between North and South were still raw, and acts of conciliation were good politics. Moreover, the Lost Cause rewriting of history, which held that the South's cause was as just as the North's, and its leaders as noble as the North's, was in full swing. But whatever immediate uses these names may have had are long gone. What remains is stark and clear: These names are an insult to the American soldier.

The men who have been honored run the gamut of moral authority and military aptitude. The most famous of these is Robert E. Lee, for whom Fort Lee, in central Virginia, is named. Honored as a paragon of virtue, Lee led rebel forces to many astonishing victories, and almost won a great triumph at Gettysburg. The 3,500 U.S. soldiers buried there were eloquently eulogized by Abraham Lincoln for a sacrifice that gave America a new birth of freedom. It seems a mockery to name a base in honor of the man whose guns put them there.

The nine other Confederates were hardly Lee's equal, either as moral exemplars or military leaders. Fort Benning in Georgia is named for Henry Benning, who was an effective officer under Lee. Before the war, he was an ardent secessionist who enflamed fears of abolition and the threat posed by free blacks. "We will be overpowered and our men will be compelled to wander like vagabonds all over the earth,'' warned Benning, in one hysterical speech in which he urged Georgia to follow South Carolina into secession. "And as for our women, the horrors of their state we cannot contemplate in imagination.'' Benning very specifically can be named as one who brought civil war to America.

Another installation in Georgia, Fort Gordon, is named for John B. Gordon, one of Lee's most dependable commanders. Before the Civil War began, lawyer Gordon defended slavery as "the hand-maid of civil liberty.'' After the war, he became a U.S. senator and headed the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia. He "may not have condoned the violence employed by Klan members,'' says his biographer Ralph Lowell Eckert, "but he did not question or oppose it when he felt it was justified.'' In other words, he was a rebel and a terrorist.

Fort Hood in Texas is named after John Bell Hood, a valiant general who led his Texan regiments in glorious, ferocious frontal assaults at Antietam and Gettysburg that were widely admired, and who later led his troops in catastrophic frontal assaults that destroyed his regiments at Atlanta and Franklin. A.P. Hill, for whom Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia is named, was another tough leader whose aggressiveness often led to poor results. Gen. Pierre G. T. Beauregard, for whom a camp in Louisiana is named, was the Confederacy's first military hero, but his overweening pride made sure that he served out most of the war in secondary posts.

Braxton Bragg, for whom Fort Bragg in North Carolina is named, was a vain, irascible, and indecisive leader who kept his command thanks to his long friendship with President Jefferson Davis. Fort Polk in Louisiana is named after Leonidas Polk, an Episcopal bishop who owned approximately 400 slaves. His mediocre generalship is distinguished mostly by his gruesome death, in he was nearly decapitated by a cannon ball.

Fort Pickett in Virginia is named after the flamboyant George Pickett, whose division was famously decimated at Gettysburg. Pickett was accused of war crimes for ordering the execution of 22 Union prisoners, but once the war ended, the case was dropped. Colonel Edmund Rucker led a cavalry brigade in battles in Tennessee. After the war, he became a business leader in Birmingham, and everyone called him general. For that, he got a fort. What all these men have in common is that they fought and killed U.S. Army solders.

Today, about a sixth of our armed forces are people of African-American origin. When we dispatch them to fight for freedom from camps named after slaveholders, racists and terrorists, the irony reaches an offensive level.

Jamie Malanowski is the author of the biography Commander Will Cushing: Daredevil Hero of the Civil War.